Rockinawsome's site

Helping New Developers

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:02:08 +0000

I was wondering what things I should direct a buddy of mine in the Army from the BYOND community so that he can get started learning not just BYOND, but how to program in general. This is tricky, because when I started the best thing I had was an RPG tutorial/demo thing that doesn't seem to be around anymore. There must be more current things that are commonly used now.

Thanks!

Request: Step through code

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:32:30 +0000

Just thinking it would be great if I could "step through" byond code the way it's done in visual studio with .Net.

For example, I have a strange scenario right now where I'm not sure what's really controlling a pegasus (so manly) I made at the moment, because I'm going through some old code and don't remember what I did. I'm having to comment out things bit by bit to figure out what's going on, but if I could step through it, it would speed development time up.

Sound channel system sanity check

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:46:12 +0000

Does BYOND's sound channels ONLY work with WAV files? So if I were to use an OGG file, play it in the background, there would be no way to layer it, repeat it, or stop it without building a custom system?

I'm thrown off by this line here from the reference: channel: 0 for any available channel, 1-8 for specific channel (wavs only)

I don't think I'd even be asking this question except I've been frustrating myself with attempts to use an OGG for background music, and then have it switch off when I logout of the starting mob.

To stop the sound by channel I'm attempting:

src<<sound(null,,1,0)

Responce: http://www.military.com/news/article/general-troops-to-be-spread-thinner.html

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 17:41:19 +0000

Why doesn't anyone in D.C. actually understand strategy? Has anyone read Sun Tzu? This is a fool's game where the only ones who win are the politicians. Spread the Army thin? The army of tomorrow will be flexible? These are bywords for weak and incapable. The national annual budget allocates next to nothing for defense and spends 50 percent on entitlements. That's a damn joke. What king ruling his land would allow his country to waste his treasury? What king would not spend most of his treasury on defense? We are fools to think that we can do otherwise merely because we are a republic. To be clear, this is not the fault of the General, but the fault of the politicians who demand a "draw down" of forces -- a stupid, flawed idea only supported by morons. Leave all at once, or win the war, those are your options.

daininguruumu

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:02:46 +0000

Just making an entry here so anyone looking on the internet for this will find it. It was on Rosetta Stone.

In Japanese daininguruumu means "dining room".

It's one of the funny words that sounds like its English equivalent, even if it doesn't match it perfectly for phonetic reasons. Other words I like that are like this one are wanpisu for dress (which sounds like "one piece" or "one piece suit") or wanru-mumanshon for studio apartment (which sounds like one room mansion).

Bolivar Theives Caught

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 01:29:12 +0000

The Bolivar thieves have been caught, I hear. Apparently, they needed money for heroin...always a worthy cause.

Bolivar Robbery Spree

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:32:10 +0000

Apparently Bolivar NY is undergoing a rash of robberies. I've heard that the catholic church's safe was stolen, the school was robbed, and some businesses and homes. I've also heard that vans are driving around taking pictures of things and that unusual people are in town. And now I make the inference that we should all buy guns to defend ourselves and our property. I really hate thieves.

H@x0rd today.

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:42:55 +0000

The ip address came from:
Belarus (87.252.227.12)

Compromised my email, then my twitter, not sure what else yet. Also not sure how he managed to get a password of my complexity and length, unless it got stolen in some cookie on some crap website or some database didn't encrypt its passwords or, well, you get the drift. Is it even possible to do brute force hacking on a gmail account? I don't use public wifi, ever.

Edit 1*
Well I googled the IP address and came up with:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ip_87.252.227.12

I'm now wikipedia-ing what a Dictionary Attack is.

Edit 2*

Okay, so a dictionary attack is similar to a brute force attack, it just uses common words from the dictionary instead. However, the password I used doesn't use an english word, and uses a combination of punctuation and numbers.

If my account was hacked in this manner as project honey pot suggests, I still don't understand why google would allow a barrage of logins. Isn't it common sense to block login attempts after 5, 10, 15, 20, or hell, even a 100 times?

I'm not convinced this was a dictionary attack.

Edit 3* For the admin that removed this from appearing on byond's frontpage, my email was a Gmail account. So you can imagine my frustration. I was thinking back though, and I do remember checking my email on an old PC at my wife's parents house. It's possible they have a key logger on that machine.

TME Skin -- Kyoto

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 01:07:14 +0000

Here is my garish skin as promised.

I also forgot to mention a technical note in my previous post, so I will mention it here. I developed this program on a machine that runs Vista with service pack 2 for a 32 bit machine. This is likely of no concern for windows users unless they are running Windows 7. If the user is running 7, they will need to run the program as Administrator by right clicking it, or if they all ready are an administrator they won't have to worry about it. Also, the program should be set to compatibility mode by right clicking on the shortcut on the desktop and selecting Vista Sp2.

Kyoto Skin: http://www.byond.com/members/Rockinawsome/files/kyoto.zip

Translation Made Easy

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 01:01:21 +0000

After a couple months of on an off again work and quite a few hours, I'm releasing a program for free that I've worked on as a hobby. I developed the program when I decided it would be nice to have one browser on top of another without having to use the windows key shortcuts. The reason I thought this would be nice, was for translating while I learn another language. I'm currently interested in learning Japanese (see Nihongo), and I've studied some Spanish in my time, but I've always had difficulties finding the time to translate foreign newspapers online. Well, this program I developed as a means to solve that problem of mine. A person can keep notes and check off the things he or she would like to read in a day. It is also possible to skin this program and even change part of the title of the program so that a teacher for instance would be able to say "Mrs. Drake's Español".

As a side note, you can use this program to launch any 2 programs in the same window if you're clever enough. However, you must be aware that some things may not render quickly enough in this context.

This program uses some rather hackish work to accomplish its ends, and I'm not joking when I say I had to visit a hacker's website to figure some of this out.

Initially, I thought I could release this program Open Source, but because I'm not a lawyer, I could never really settle on a way to preserve my little "About" button if I released the source. It's a shame because I really love some of the stuff that comes out of the open source community. For example, there really is no better free decompression/compression utility for instance than PeaZip in my opinion.

I fully understand that this program may crash, or much more likely, that the browsers you load may crash as there is no kosher way that I know of for doing what I'm doing. However, SOME BROWSERS WORK MUCH BETTER THAN OTHERS. I recommend either Firefox or Internet Explorer, or even Opera (technically it doesn't allow 2 instances of itself under the same user, but I found a way to trick it). Google Chrome was downright spotty in its performance and was hit or miss depending on the version. Safari cannot have 2 running instances of itself under the same user that I'm aware of, so you should avoid it unless you want to only use the "Split Top Browser" command that I've embedded in the program, but that only works marginally, and you'll see what I mean if you use it (it doesn't actually "split" the browser per say). I don't believe Netscape worked if anyone is wondering. Derivitives of Firefox and Internet Explorer like SeaMonkey seemed to work without any problems.

The program should be largely straight forward, yet it should be noted that when you fire up this program for the first time, you will be asked to select a browser. The way that this works is you will be given a window with a button that allows you to find the default browser. This works by pulling it from the registry and works with the majority of the browsers out there. If it does not work, or if you'd like to add additional browsers, select the "Browsers" tab and click "Add New Browser...".

From here you will need to find a shortcut to your browser, the easiest way to do this generally is to find it on your desktop (which it will default to), if you don't see it on your desktop, you may have to find it another place in your hard drive, such as the installation folder for the browser in question. A technical computer person will find this a breeze, if you are not a technical computer person, you may wish to re-install your browser as this will likely create shortcuts on your desktop.
Ensure that your browser is checked in the box that says "Set as default:".

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to leave them here, or if you'd rather they be safe from prying eyes, email me at adam.empyreal@gmail.com

The skins don't yet work properly in every capacity, but the majority of it works. The single skin I made is garish I know, but that only means that you can do better =). You will need the skin I provide as a template for how to create your own. I will upload the skin for download in the next post.

Setup for Translation Made Easy:
http://www.byond.com/members/Rockinawsome/files/setup.exe